


Persephone's Son (Orpheus Played Fiddle, Hades Let Him Go)

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, M/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 15:47:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He falls in love with Boyd Crowder because Boyd Crowder is Death and Raylan Givens is Persephone, and the shit that happens in Harlan is never original.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Persephone's Son (Orpheus Played Fiddle, Hades Let Him Go)

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to norgbelulah and Thornfield Girl for looking this over! They're the best (and the best enablers).

_Time is a river_ , Boyd says behind him. His footsteps are splashing through the slurry pond. Raylan listens but does not turn around: if time were a river, he would let it wash them both away. Time is the taste of blood in his throat. He has to find what he’s looking for the way Orpheus found the tune, and he has to do it quickly, or quickly by someone else’s standards: time has always worked a little differently for him, but he is running out of it all the same.

 _Back to the beginning_ , Boyd says. _It’s all stories that start from the beginning, Raylan._

*

There was a witch woman in the holler with tangled hair full of leaves and fingers as white as the worms that burrowed under rocks: Raylan Givens met her when he was four years old. His momma brought him. She spent the whole time whispering to the witch lady, their voices like branches lashing together in a storm, and at the end of it, the woman with the river-stone eyes called him over.

She was tucking something in her pocket with a very satisfied look on her face, pleased with whatever bargain she had made, and when he was at her knee, she said, “Candy, Raylan Givens,” and gave him a handful of deep red seeds. They were strangely warm at first, then so hot it seemed they’d burn his hand if he waited any longer, but instead of dropping them, he tossed them all into his mouth. They tasted first like honey, then like rainwater, and finally like blood.

His daddy had broken his left wrist a while back, and as Raylan swallowed the last seed, he felt that nagging pain there get smoothed out like a wrinkled sheet under his mother’s hand: his whole arm, in fact, went not _numb_ from the shoulder down but somehow cool. Painless, but even at four, he understood that this painlessness was wrong somehow.

“That’s a little extra,” the witch woman said. “It sweetens the pot.”

His mother hugged him hard on the witch’s porch, as soon as the door closed behind them. He could taste salt on her face, but the salt no longer tasted like anything at all. She clung to his shoulders fiercely. “I’m not gonna let anything happen you. I’m never going to let him—make you go away. You understand me, Raylan? Whatever happens, you’re always going to come back.”

Raylan nodded.

Two months later, Arlo got drunk and threw Raylan down the basement stairs. He hit the unfinished cement floor with a crack like a lightning bolt and felt blood come from his head like he was pressed in a fruit juicer, only pulp left behind—but he tasted honey, honey and rain, and a second later, he pulled himself off the floor and ran a hand across his smooth and unbroken scalp.

“How many did you eat?” his momma asked, but Raylan couldn’t remember.

*

 _I’ve always loved that myth,_ Boyd says. His hair is disordered, a series of lightning bolts, and when Raylan kisses him, he tastes: for the first time in years he tastes something other than honey and the rain.

*

Frances Givens died when Raylan was eighteen. He went, afterwards, to see the witch woman, because he couldn’t get the taste of honey off his tongue. His mother was freshly in her grave, but Raylan was young and so lonely his skin hurt, and stony ground felt like no obstacle at all to the way he loved his mother. He thought he could trade his life for hers—one of his lives, at least.

The witch woman laughed at him. Now that he was older, he could see that the leaves in her hair were carefully braided in, and that some of them weren’t real, just the cheap make-believe shit from a craft store or the Hobby Lobby. He could see that her flesh was slack as well as white, that she was old, that there were Oreo crumbs in the wrinkles near her mouth. None of that mattered, though: that was a veil Harlan drew over what it didn’t want the world to see.

Raylan had been split between life and death since he was four years old: he had little respect for the way things seemed to be.

“I want to bring her back.”

The witch woman smiled. “You play the fiddle, boy? Orpheus played fiddle, Hades let him go.”

They’d had that one in school and Raylan had paid attention to his Edith Hamilton the way he had never paid attention to anything else except target-shooting, whenever Arlo had been sober enough and willing enough to take him: “No, that ain’t the right story.”

It had been a girl, the way he had learned it: a girl, the daughter of a goddess, playing in a field when Death came up from the ground and took her in his arms. Her mother looked to bring her back, but the girl had eaten pomegranate seeds that sprouted in the gray earth of the underworld, and it was too late for her to ever belong to the world again the way she had before. The best she could hope was to sway with the seasons, time above and time below, neither living nor dead, until she must, Raylan thought, have fallen in love with Death, with Hades, with the same bone-deep prickle of delight he had felt when his head had hit the basement floor.

 _Oh_ , she must have said each time, stepping into her lover’s arms: _this is home_ , the one place she could never fully be away from.

But for all of that, the girl always came back, year after year, to her mother: she pried herself away from death (and Death) for the sake of that love. She came alive again for one reason only.

The witch woman, though, seemed unimpressed by this: “You think you know your story, do you?”

Raylan said, “There’s Demeter. I want to bring her back. Help me. I’ll give you—whatever she gave you, for me, I’ll give it back. I’ll give you anything.”

“Son,” the witch woman said, “nobody pays the same price more than once, nobody pays for anybody else, and nobody in their right mind is gonna do any business with a half-dead boy like you.”

*

Raylan falls in love with Boyd Crowder because he talks like velvet and laughs like broken glass; he falls in love because Boyd walks with a sway in his step. He falls in love because Boyd is air when he’s drowning.

All of these things are lies: he falls in love with Boyd Crowder because Boyd Crowder is Death and Raylan Givens is Persephone, and the shit that happens in Harlan is never original.

 _That’s a myth-conception_ , Boyd says.

 _I can’t believe you made that stupid fucking joke_. He licks his mouth and tastes salt; he denies the significance of this in more ways than one.

 _I didn’t_ , Boyd says mildly. _That was Death, Raylan. Can’t you feel it?_

*

He started working in the mine because dead things should be buried; the best he could do for the world was hide himself underground half the hours of the day. Later, Raylan would tell anyone who asked that he hated coal mining, as anyone with any kind of sense would, but that was only because the lie sounded a hell of a lot more realistic—and a hell of a lot more human—than the truth.

In the first few weeks, he had loved it with a kind of infatuation that left his head buzzing and his throat tense. He got in the habit of hanging as close to the Emulex charges as he could, just to feel the sparks spatter across his skin, and that was how he met—really met—Boyd Crowder. He heard the other boy shout, “Fire in the hole!” and he stepped further into the black and let the blast separate him from himself.

It was very beautiful, being wholly dead, and as Raylan lay against the cool dust that was the floor of the mine, his mouth flooded with the taste of the pomegranate seeds, it seemed like all that was left for him: to break himself time upon time against the bright explosions the powder men lay until he broke for good. He couldn’t, after all, have had that many seeds. One handful with one child’s hand. He could outpace his own myth, given enough time and danger.

He was still there when Boyd found him. Boyd in high school, when they’d passed each other in the hall and traded the occasional nod, had been as composed as a portrait of himself, but now he was shaking, and he took hold of Raylan by the front of his button-up uniform, smeared with coal, and pulled him up. He was standing too close.

“You can’t be down here,” Boyd said, “what the fuck’s wrong with you?” He rapped the side of Raylan’s head hard with the flat of his hand: it wasn’t until then that Raylan realized the explosion had blown his hat from him and splintered it to bits and pieces of plastic somewhere down there in the dark. “Raylan Givens. You want to make a murderer out of me, that’s your aim? You suicidal?”

“Half,” Raylan said, as there seemed no point in lying, and he spat out a mouthful of coal dust, blood, and a chalkiness he was fairly certain came from his own pulverized bones, prior to him getting knitted up again. He looked at Boyd and knew. Fate had a way of beating the shit out of a body, and nothing in life was ever subtle.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not thinking of doing it again.”

*

_Did you love me?_

_I loved you,_ Raylan says. _Even then_. The river Styx is not the river he wants, he wants the one that would let him forget, ideally, but—shit goes this way sometimes—he has forgotten the name. _You looked like someone who wouldn’t let me stay in-between. You seemed like you’d pull me out of the river if you could just see it, or else you’d pull me down through the field, and whether we breathed or burned—I would, you would, we—something, I don’t know. I would feel something. I’d feel you. Yeah, I guess I loved you._

 _I would have pulled you out of the river if you’d let me,_ Boyd says.

*

Raylan read poems and mythology alongside his split-spined paperback mysteries and horrors—he liked Travis McGee and wants that life, the white knight on the houseboat, the sway of the water (the River Styx, the River Lethe), and he liked anything with monsters and torn skin, anything with _frisson_. It was Boyd who told him about _frisson_ , and _pathos_ , and it was Boyd who got his knuckles bruised alongside him when Raylan got careless and brought one of the myth-books to the mine smashed into his lunch pail.

“Look at this shit Givens is reading,” someone said: Crewe, a heavy-set towheaded guy. Raylan hated Crewe about the same way he hated everybody around that time. Crewe was alive and he wasn’t, and so he didn’t even wait for Crewe to finish making the joke about the Greeks and faggots that he was starting. He just barreled into him.

Time, for Raylan, was not like time for other people. When things should have been most alive, when adrenaline should have been peaking, time went as slow as a hot Sunday, and he could do what he liked in it.

Still, it surprised him that Boyd fell in beside him, hands swinging too, and at the end of it, blood on their fists, Boyd threw him a grin with the same ferocity as he’d been throwing punches.

“What was in that for you?” Raylan asked, trailing him back to where they’d been sitting and eating. His lunch pail was knocked sideways, his sandwich in the dust, so Body split his and handed half over. Raylan took it without thanks, still waiting for the answer to his question.

“I would never support censorship, Raylan,” Boyd said.

He had bitten already through the part of the sandwich he’d given to Raylan: Raylan fitted his lips to the imprint of Boyd and felt peanut butter distantly connect with his teeth. He didn’t taste that so much as the warmly metallic leftover of Boyd’s own mouth. He wiped his palms against his coveralls and said, “You want a drink after?”

“After, during, before,” Boyd said. He grazed his hand against Raylan’s shoulder, thumb flickering slightly against the wide collar of the coverall, and Raylan thought, without judgment, _He’s done this before._

*

 _Oh, not like you, Raylan_ , Boyd says. _Never like you, no one like you._

_You’re in my head. Makes sense I’d flatter myself._

_No, I’m in the underworld, Raylan, and that’s a difference you’d best learn, as you’re with me._ They’re back walking through the slurry again, and it’s acidic enough to eat at Raylan’s boots: he worries about Boyd’s feet. Love like that is a muscle memory.

_You’re going too slowly._

_I’ve got time,_ Raylan says, and since he knows this part of the story—since he’s taken by myth but not myth-taken, since there is no myth-conception—he doesn’t turn to look at Boyd to drive his point home into eyes that would fade away underneath the weight of his own.

_You don’t have as much time as you think._

_We never did have as much time as I wanted_ , he says.

Boyd touches the nape of his neck. His fingers are icy cold. _Raylan, please._

*

Boyd Crowder’s mouth tasted like whiskey and apples from his lunch pail; his skin tasted like sweat and dust. Raylan tried to taste every inch of him, to track his skin down the landscape of Boyd’s body like a river against the parchment of a map, charting him steadily into place, and he worried that it was going to creep Boyd out, the intensity of his tongue and teeth. Too slobbery and too sloppy, no damn profundity to it, not next to the casual brush of Boyd’s thumb so close to his throat, but Boyd gasped and moaned, undone by him, all his surety shattered.

“Fuck, Raylan,” Boyd said. His eyes burned in the dark like candles and Raylan hadn’t ever felt more alive than this, never mind the pomegranate seeds. He bit Boyd’s collarbone.

It was hard for Raylan to get drunk, and it sometimes even bordered, like so much of him, on impossible, but he was drunk on Boyd and the thrill of tasting something for the first time in years.

“Down through the field,” he said. “Oh, damn, Boyd, down, down,” and Boyd took him at his word, inasmuch as he could understand it.

Boyd thought he knew things about who they were, but Boyd didn’t know shit.

Raylan fell in love with him anyway.

*

_You never did take things slow, I don’t know why you’re fixing to start now._

_You never took things fast._

_I’m falling apart inside my own skin_ , Boyd says, and they’re no longer wading through the slurry. They’re at Ava Crowder’s kitchen table and Boyd smells like fried chicken and if Raylan kisses him, he will taste that way, too, but Raylan did not kiss him then. It’s a prompt: Boyd wants him to rush. He puts white teeth against gray bone and says, _My heart, Raylan_ , and Raylan doesn’t know if it’s an instruction, a lie, or what he can barely remember from seventh grade grammar. An appositive.

 _I’ll run_ , Raylan promises. He kisses Boyd for the taste of chicken grease and blood, like a talisman.

*

He ran when he was nineteen, too: he ran straight out of the mine, tugged along by Boyd’s hand and Boyd’s freely given heart, and for a second, with the rocks falling around them and the coal dust thick in the air, he felt alive, the way he did beneath Boyd’s hands and lips. He tasted the air. A rock—and he would never told Boyd this, he would never deny Boyd the pleasure of having saved him, whatever came between them, he would never do that—fell and caught him wide across the temple. A flash of light subsumed his vision and he died again and then didn’t, and Boyd took it for a stumble and nothing more. The taste of honey and rain.

He thought that it was a symbol. He thought that it was part of the myth he had read into tatters, but myths were slippery as eels and just as hard to catch and hold steady: if Raylan thought that Boyd would pull him out of the underworld, Orpheus dragging Eurydice behind him, Hades granting Persephone her leave, he had forgotten that in Harlan, sometimes the ceiling of the world just gave in and tried to cripple or kill you.

When they came into the light of the living world again, Raylan was as dead as he had been since childhood, and as he looked at Boyd, sweat-streaked and smiling, still clinging to his hand in broad daylight—there’d be talk about that later—he didn’t see Hades at all. He saw a nineteen year-old boy with a hickey on his neck, a nineteen year-old in full strut from having saved someone’s life, and Raylan hated him as deeply as he’d ever hated anyone. He tore his hand away.

“People,” he said, his mouth dry.

“Yeah,” Boyd said, with his carelessly beautiful smile, and Raylan wondered how he could have ever mistaken Boyd Crowder for Death. Longing, he guessed. If you loved something, you wanted it to save you, and Raylan had wanted to blot himself out against something.

“I don’t come back to life,” Raylan said. “I’m never gonna do that. I just keep going.”

Boyd looked at him. “I think you got hit on the head, maybe, Raylan.” He said it slowly.

“I did.” He felt the stickiness of the blood still in his hair, lying on top of sealed scalp and bone. “I have to go, Boyd.”

“There’s gonna be compensation,” Boyd said, “and people bringing ‘round whiskey. Cocoa, even, maybe, Raylan, you don’t want to miss that,” and with the same easy grace as he’d brushed against Raylan’s collar, he turned a little, as though on a pivot, and laid his fingers lightly against the sharp corner of Raylan’s left hip. “Stay.”

He could, he supposed. He could see the world by the light of Boyd’s eyes and he could satisfy his desires against Boyd’s body. Certainly it would piss Arlo off, and that at least would have entertainment value.

But he saw that Boyd would keep trying to save his life, and as he looked at Boyd, he thought, _That ain’t what I want_ —not the hand out, not Orpheus through the Styx, but Death and Death only, and he wouldn’t find that with Boyd Crowder a ceaseless presence at his back.

So he let someone put a blanket over his shoulders and he drank hot chocolate warmed still further with a dollop of something stronger, and later that night, out in the woods where it was so dark they didn’t even have faces, he bit Boyd’s lip until it bled. Boyd’s blood tasted like the lingering aftermath of the pomegranate seeds and Raylan tucked his face against his neck, grinding his hips forward, and he muttered half-shapeless words of love against Boyd’s skin.

By sun-up, he was in Lexington, scouting around for shit jobs to pay for him fixing up his truck. Boyd didn’t follow him. That was just as well: Raylan didn’t know if he could have left him a second time, not with Boyd’s mouth still swollen from that goodbye kiss.

*

 _I burned through your love_ , Raylan says. He hates that it sounds like a country song, and not even one of the decent old ones with the grit and the soulfulness but something trite with a music video. _When I came back and you were such an asshole, I had to jerk off in the car about it, because there you were, Boyd, the asshole I’d always needed you to be. When you had your hands on me, you were so hot it was like you were burning alive. I thought you’d kill me for sure._

_You weren’t the one who ended that conversation with a bullet in you._

_I thought at the last minute_ , Raylan says, _that I knew what to do. And that, dead or alive, what I wanted was more time._

_That’s about the last thing we have._

They are in the mine—that is as close to the truth as Raylan’s turn of the myth will allow him to come, that is what passes for truth here in his mind when the hour is late and there is so little light, and Ava is calling 911 somewhere back over his shoulder—it is smooth rock he feels against his palm, not the scuffed linoleum of a kitchen floor. And Raylan is not Persephone but Orpheus, and their love story is the tune he has to play to Death. It’s always Death that it comes down to. It’s only Death who will do business with half-dead Harlan boys like him.

But there time is running short, and Boyd knows it: Boyd, who is the light at the bottom of the well of his eyes. Boyd, who is the rattle in his chest and the voice in Raylan’s head.

*

Raylan had died—or not died, being already dead and all—three times before he left Harlan, and in truth, he joined up with the Marshals because it seemed as good a way as any to count down the last of his lives. The one he remembered best was the one Art helped him up from on a fugitive grab outside Glynco: Art’s hands were trembling at the time, and that was something Raylan had never thought to see.

“I really thought that had gotten you,” Art said.

“No,” Raylan lied easily, rolling his shoulders forward to conceal the bullet-hole in his shirt. “Just tripped. Naturally lucky.”

“Natural clumsiness is not natural luck.”

“Well, it’s as close as I’m ever likely to get.”

Sometimes, if they were alone enough, he let the other man fire first as well as pull: it wasn’t like their stories would ever be believed, anyhow, even if they lived. Once he let a guy catch him straight between the eyes. The bullet pressed in like a finger and the world went monochrome and flat like an old photograph and it took an hour for color to trickle back into his vision, even after he had sat himself up and fired back. He was pissed about the lack of reds and greens, so he might have enjoyed punching that particular ticket a little more than was strictly necessary.

By the time he got sent back to Harlan—and back to Boyd—he hadn’t died eight times.

He thought sometimes that things between him and Winona broke on the wheel because he said it that way to her, once, when he was half-asleep and dressing for an early call-in, when she was saying he needed to be careful: “I’ve already not died five times, I don’t think it’s gonna be any different today.” It was the kind of thing that could have been played as a joke if he’d had the right cards, but when he realized what he’d said, he just kept turning up jokers like they were all that was in the pack. He had scared her.

Then there was Boyd.

Boyd had never been scared of him. An answer never could have been scared of a question.

*

 _Oh, Raylan_ , Boyd says. _I was terrified of you._

Raylan nods. He knows that now. People in the underworld shed their secrets like they’re hot for it, uncurling things they’ve never spoken like scarfs, whipping them like belts, letting them puddle around their ankles, and now there is nothing about Boyd that he does not know. He also knows something about himself, because time is slow and Lethe is nowhere and Styx is all he has: there were nine seeds in the palm of his hand, that sticky afternoon so many years ago, and he doesn’t know what will happen when they are gone.

It doesn’t matter.

 _That’s the tune,_ he says. _Orpheus played fiddle, Hades let him go. It’s my fucking myth, now give him back to me_ , and he experiences an almost coolly sublime sense of gratitude as the taste of honey and sweet rain floods his mouth. He lowers himself to Boyd, whose face he is allowed to see—all their stories are wearing each other’s skins—and teases the seed out between his teeth. He is sure it is as blood-red as he remembers it.

He passes it to Boyd through a kiss.

 _Bite down, darlin’,_ he says.

And because Boyd can’t, because the waters of the Styx are lapping up around his throat, he puts one hand at the crown of Boyd’s head and one hand underneath his chin and presses together. Boyd swallows reflexively and Raylan _feels_ it—feels the last of his death bleed out from the tips of his fingers and toes as color rushes into Boyd’s face and he gasps, coughing up blood all over Ava’s kitchen floor. Raylan means to tend to him, but he can’t: he’s knocked back on his heels, breathing hard as the world changes around him. He tastes the air. He smells the supper Ava cooked, her perfume, Boyd’s blood, the dying flowers on the kitchen table. He feels the weight of his clothes on his skin. Everything is sharpened—all colors and all senses—like a knife against stone.

He thought he would die, giving Boyd what he had known, then, to be the last of the pomegranate seeds, the last of what let him move freely—or stay halfway, any case—between life and death.

He never considered he might _live_.

Boyd reaches out and his fingers, warm, brush against Raylan’s wrist: he is, for the first time, not the only thing in the world that Raylan Givens can feel.

He is just the best thing.

“Holy God, Raylan,” Ava says, as Boyd sits up, pulls himself up along the ladder of Raylan’s arm, still coughing, still ragged from his chest knitting itself together again.

Raylan will explain, later, what he can. As much as he can. He doesn’t think she will be too hard to convince: she grew up in the holler, too, and she knew the witch woman, must have made a game of touching the edge of her porch before running away.

The song he sang to death, that will be harder to tell to her, because he knows already that his Boyd is not her Boyd, but people from the holler are used to that, too. And it is—like the sirens, louder and louder in his ears, sharper than they’d ever been before—a problem for later, though time is slipping so quickly through his fingers now that he almost doesn’t know what to do with it. He laughs and kisses Boyd’s mouth, his eyes, his forehead, and Boyd says, “I was in a river,” while Raylan’s lips are against his eyelids. “You sang—you said—”

“Shh,” Raylan says, because people are coming inside even now. They have so little time. “I decided who we were, that’s all,” and, in a move that Art will later decide is “unprofessional, to say the least,” he presses his mouth hard against Boyd’s and licks all the taste of honey off his lips. There is nothing left for the two of them now but life.


End file.
